Friday, July 17, 2015

Jake Kennedy, Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play

1.
That It Is Madness to Judge the True at the False from Our Own Capacities

So there could be a
party for the celebration of our absurd expectations…—please join us for The Brittle Years and for the recitation of the
elegy entitled “Our Finest Earlier Pronouncements or Boy Are We Jerks”—with
all the guests holding crystal Y’s: their empty questions, really—which (let
us) fill with sand or the guts of watches or Kool-Aid—ah, the best writing
says: we are stupid and beautiful,
keep it up! (“Giant Omen”)

Kelowna, British Columbia poet and editor Jake Kennedy’s third poetry collection is the
absurdist and sincerely earnest Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2015). Following
The Lateral(Montreal QC: Snare
Books, 2010) and Apollinaire’s Speech to the War Medic(BookThug, 2011), this new book concerns itself with
discovery and being lost, and how one can only truly be achieved through the
other, composing a series of striking poems deliberately meant to occasionally unsettle,
forcing a deeper attention of his incredibly sharp and precise poems that shift
from meditation to improvisation, and tight lyric to prose poems, and even include
a sequence of poems composed as billboard-style single sentences. Kennedy’s
poems delight in the mix of classical reference, meditative lyric and mischievous
speech, tossing in the occasional line or phrase of casual diction, or a pop
reference that at first might seem entirely out of place. Kennedy revels in the
play between the two—high and low culture, high and low speech—and shows the
possibilities of what poetry can become through the blending of worlds too
commonly kept apart in contemporary poetry (think also of David McGimpsey’s self-titled “chubby sonnets”).

A
Brief History of the Tornadoes of

Oxford County, Ontario

Because the future
needs space

the wind makes a field

the labourer himself

and the crow further on

in order to place two
keyholes

in the horizon

what gives up as the
sun gives up

to obtain other
reputations: down

or anyway going towards gone—

one does not believe in
assurance

I don’t at least—only vulnerabilities

as different stages of imam-blow-yer-fkin-shack-down

their threats and this
relinquishing:

a cow, then a church

moving above the trees.

Much
like his previous collection, Apollinaire’s
Speech to the War Medic, Merz
Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play, Kennedy concerns himself with history,
citing a variety of historical figures and their works including Camille
Claudel, René Char, Cezanne, Stan Brakhage and even Harold Ramis, as though, through them,
working through his own sense of the contemporary. As he writes in “A Brief
History of the Cemeteries of Huron County, Ontario”: “for those who do or no
not / reach into their past like darkened rooms[.]” His poems move from elegy
to lyric fragment, exploring a looseness (in comparison to McGimpsey,
certainly) that allows his poems a particular quality of lightness, and a
cadence of sound and collision that nearly make one want to read each piece
aloud.

Composition
2

To be all, especially a
body. Look, a a well has coherence but no singleness of focus; nothing within
it (you) is irrelevant. The body as array; you have a wish to make a thread
fused to another: ordering them, you give the way you want, while the other,
ordinary body deals with its singleness by focusing attention on time. In other
words, you lose the “logically”—you look to unity to be irrelevant digressions
and unnecessary shifts in points of view: “you” as rearranging body: your
disrupted singleness: a wish in a well.